Remember during Operation Desert Storm, when world media made a big deal out of a US bomb having hit an Iraqi air raid shelter and killing 230-some odd civilians? As Paul Harvey would say, here's "The rest of the story"...Saddam Hussein was moving around a lot, I mean a LOT, several times a day, several times a night. We actually taught him this during his war with Iran, who were the bad guys at the time. He was spending a tremendous amount of time in hardened Command & Control bunkers, and the US needed something to be able to effectively target them with. You'd hear a lot of "we're not in the business of targeting a nation's leaders" from the talking heads, in those days, but Saddam was also the head of the Iraqi military, which made him an absolute PLUM of a target!

Two bombs, about 2500 lbs apiece, were built down in Eglin. The bomb casings were 8" naval battery barrels, to stand up to the rigors of transiting through several yards of steel reinforced concrete at terminal velocity. These bombs were literally built with Saddam's name on them!

We received solid intelligence regarding Saddam's whereabouts, and the decision was made to kill him. The bombs were loaded and transported supersonically (read B1, probably, which was otherwise conspicuously absent during Desert Storm). In Saudi, it was moved to an F117, and sent into Indian Country. When the bomb bay door opened over Iraq, the intelligence was 16 hours old, and Saddam was gone. The bomb went approx 11 feet underground before encountering concrete...it penetrated 27 feet of steel reinforced concrete, and detonated inside the bunker, killing everyone and everything inside it. Ever on the lookout for a chance to score a propaganda coup, Saddam had taken to filling the bunkers with civilians and calling them air raid shelters immediately after he departed. As I said before, we taught him straight out of our playbook in the early '80's, so he had to have a strong (and reasonable) suspicion that we'd eventually make a play for him. Fortunately, he wasn't able to make as much hay from that as he'd have liked, but he did make some, at the expense of 230-some odd of his own people.

Now you know the rest of the story.